Greatest living Englishmen

Also known as national treasures... but who would you nominate for such a list? Stephen Fry is a name much bandied about in such discussions, though I have good friends with valued opinions who cannot abide Mr Fry. The perma-quiffed genius that is Morrissey is another for the shortlist and, whilst we're perusing the musical world, let's also include Jarvis Cocker.

I'd like to throw another name into the ring at this point... Danny Wallace. Who, you may say? Well, in his comparatively short life (he's younger than me, so I can say that), he has:

• started a cult of people performing random acts of kindness, with the simple phrase "join me";
• spent a year saying yes to any question and every opportunity, as an exercise in positive thinking;
• been to the centre of the universe (wouldn't you just know it - it's in the American Mid-West);
• started his own country, complete with national anthem, passport, flag, constitution, the works.

Speaking as someone who agonises over every decision in life, scrutinising everything to the n-th degree, I find Danny's "I can make this happen" approach to be inspirational. He should be a national hero, instead of just being recognised as the host of the recent BBC1 quiz show School's Out... Danny, I salute you. And not just because you're the country of Lovely's head of state.

Feast your mince pies on this

Just a quick note to advertise an interesting website - having recently spent a lot of time listening to the Italian Job soundtrack I wanted to discover the meaning of a few Cockney rhyming slang phrases with which I was unfamiliar. Imagine my delight, then, to discover cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk which has a searchable lexicon of such terms, plus English to Cockney and Cockney to English dictionaries. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you want to know quite why "James Blunt" has been the most popular new submission to this website for the last five months though...